Recent News and Travels

Upcoming trips:

Blog: Dark Matter of the Mind

My newest article appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education on April 30, 2017. “In a Pirahã village along the Maici River in Brazil, I squeezed mustard onto a piece of bread. An old woman from the village watched me. “Why do you eat bird shit?,” she asked. There was irritation in her voice. Then […]

A discussion of Understanding Recursion and Looking for Self-Embedding in Pirahã, by Raiane Oliveira Salles, Pontifícia Universidade Católica of Rio de Janeiro. http://www.maxwell.vrac.puc-rio.br/26480/26480.PDF In the decades since I began field research on the Pirahã language, in December of 1977, 39 years ago, no one else has done any descriptive linguistics field research on this language. Brazilian […]

Gibberish meets Wolfe: Recursion is Just a State of Mind Tom Wolfe’s new book, The Kingdom of Speech, continues to be the object of scathing reviews on blogs, in comments, and even in newspaper articles by linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, journalists, and evolutionary biologists – often people with some belief that the views of Noam Chomsky […]